September 1, 2021: Pirate Studies -

Ah, I see now how this works, this whole family history thing – it’s a rabbit hole. Makes sense.

In the interests of fairness, I will tell of my maternal grandparents and their reaction to my mom marrying outside of the Christian faith. My mom wasn’t very religious, but her parents got more and more religious throughout their lives, more and more involved with their evangelical church.

Grampa George and Grandma Onda were nicknamed by infant me as Pappy and Gramma. (Once our daughter came along, Gramma asked to be called Gee, because (she said) that was what Welsh people used instead of Great Grandma. And she was clear on her origin story:  Welsh coal miners, then Pennsylvania coal miners, then to California for the Gold Rush. I wear a ring of gold mined in Sutter Creek, California.)

When my brother and I were in high school, Gramma and Pappy broadened their already extensive church doings to include involvement with the Campus Crusade for Christ (which felt to me as if they had finally found a source for higher-quality grandchild-substitutes). As often as not, there’d be a Campus Crusader or two around when we went to visit. They’d pray for the immortal souls of my dad (still thinking of himself as Jewish, though only culturally), and my brother and me (Switzerland! Neutral! Not aligned! Just Leave Us Out of This!).

I thought praying for us in front of us was unbelievably rude. Also ineffective, if it came to that.

I think they hoped I would develop a (salutary, chaste) crush on one Crusader who tried to talk to me about Dag Hammarskjold. HA HA HA HA HA (wipes eyes).  HAHAHA.

My grandfather was worse than my grandmother in the overtly-praying-for-us stuff. Grandma Onda was a bit of an imp. She was four foot eleven and full of mischief, which helps if you want to rock the imp image. She had funny sayings. She would twinkle, and make up tall tales, and wink.

She believed her brown eyes came from Spanish forebears, that she’d descended from Morgan the Pirate, or at the very least one of his Spanish henchfellows, following the ravishment of an innocent Welsh maiden. (When our daughter was studying in Cornwall, she had a pal who was pursuing her advanced degree in Pirate Studies, as one does in Cornwall. I told that pal about Grandma Onda’s brown-eyed claim to pirate ancestry. She said, “Yeah, probably.” So shame on me for questioning that one, I guess.)

Grandma Onda was deft socially, though occasionally she’d try to flatter my father by saying admiring things about Judaism, which absolutely never worked.  Once she was arguing with my mom the physician, contending that natural remedies and prayer were clearly superior to prescribed meds, which drove my mother insane. Hoping to enlist my dad, Gramma twinkled at him and said, “I’m sure YOUR people had many wonderful herbal remedies, Allen!” My dad said levelly, “Who are ‘my people,’ Onda?” 

HAHAHAHAHAHA  (wipes eyes again). No, you had to be there.

Here’s a clash-of-cultures compare and contrast:

One time, Grandma Celia asked me how things were going, and I said, “Great!”

She said disapprovingly, “You are so conceited.”

Translation:  Other people are suffering, and if you aren’t, you shouldn’t boast about it.  The appropriate answer would have been, “Not bad.”

One time, I called my Grandma Onda when Pappy had been hospitalized. I asked how she was, and she said, “Wonderful!”

Translation: Expressing anything less than joy at all eventualities shows a lack of faith and submission to God’s will.

In other words, Reading the Room was a challenge. 

Also, I used to think Grandma Celia was the more extreme outlier here, but I have noticed that in pandemic times (racial justice times, wildfire times, hurricane times, these times) almost all of us are playing by her rule book. “Not bad” is a sensitive answer, and it often means, “I’m fine, maybe even better than fine personally, but boy, am I ever aware things are dire out there and it would be unseemly for me to say GREAT!”

Grandma Onda fell into a funk in her very last years, when the Rapture she had been banking on didn’t give her a timely exit. She was truly disappointed.  She lost some of that disciplined gratitude. But she still had game. Pappy would visit her in the nursing home, and she’d coyly talk about how That Nice Man from Church had been to see her last night, and he had brought her a rose.  (And she had, of course, given the rose away to one of the nurses. Who wasn’t there right now.)

She wasn’t confused. She was just pushing Pappy’s buttons. It was like a Master’s level course in impishness.